


Dragon Breath

by egocentrifuge



Category: Rhett & Link
Genre: GTA AU, M/M, Pre-Slash, aka rhett and link are criminals as are most youtubers ever, it's an actual trope I swear, there's no graphic violence but it is major character injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-14
Updated: 2016-05-14
Packaged: 2018-06-08 11:16:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6852451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/egocentrifuge/pseuds/egocentrifuge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rhett’s met by silence, broken only by the hum of the freezer. Good place to hide, a freezer. The insulation dampened sound, the cold deterred investigation, the thick walls and stocked shelves stopped most any bullet. (Not a lot of ways to exit a freezer, though, when you got right down to it. And if some motherhumper had, say, noticed the blood trail your buddy left while you dragged his sorry self into cover, it was real easy for that exit to get… compromised.)</p><p>Rhett’s eyes sting where he’s got them trained on the door, but the magnum in his hands doesn’t waver. In his peripheral vision, he sees Link slide slowly to the ground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dragon Breath

“I’m telling you, man, you just gotta—you have to visualize it. You’ve just got to take that part of you and put it, push it down, it’s all you gotta do.”

“W-would you shut u-up? I ain’t, I c-can’t visualize nothing right n-now.”

“That’s because you’re letting the cold control you, Link, you need–”

“I _need_ you to be _qu-quiet.”_

“Me talking’s gonna warm up the air more than us just sitting here, man.”

Rhett’s met by silence, broken only by the hum of the freezer. Good place to hide, a freezer. The insulation dampened sound, the cold deterred investigation, the thick walls and stocked shelves stopped most any bullet. (Not a lot of ways to exit a freezer, though, when you got right down to it. And if some motherhumper had, say, noticed the blood trail your buddy left while you dragged his sorry self into cover, it was real easy for that exit to get… compromised.)

Rhett’s eyes sting where he’s got them trained on the door, but the magnum in his hands doesn’t waver. In his peripheral vision, he sees Link slide slowly to the ground.

“Come on, get up,” Rhett urges. If they stop moving—if Link stops moving—

“Shove it,” Link mutters. “What am I gonna do, c-calisthenics?”

Rhett’s cramping muscles aren’t quiet about their unhappiness when he abandons his post, pushes forward to kneel beside Link. What’s supposed to be a quick glance turns into a lingering look as Rhett takes in the pallor of Link’s cheeks, the lips that are as pale as—

The moon in the rearview mirror. A bandage when it finally comes away clean. Naked thighs and the curve of something Rhett hadn’t meant to see, never intended to linger on.

(Death isn’t here, isn’t in this cooler between gallons of ice cream and pre-cooked hamburgers. Not for them, not today.)

“You gotta get up, man,” Rhett says. His hands are too numb to tell if his finger’s on the trigger anymore—he doesn’t feel bad for abandoning his vigil to tend to his friend.

“Come on,” he repeats. “You’re fine, come on.”

Link’s blood is a layer of ice between them when their hands find each other. By all rights, he shouldn’t be able to feel the way Link holds on—(as if they’re teenagers again, washed in red and white and blue as they hurtle over highway dividers hand and hand and laugh at the lead in the air)—but the contact is electric (Link laughing at Rhett’s burnt fingers—they don’t call it _hotwiring_ for nothing).

Rhett squeezes. Link tries. It’s wrong that Rhett is the one giving air to the grievance that wasn’t, it isn’t his place to say, but Link’s struggling for breath and Rhett doesn’t have any other way to warm him.

“You know we, I always thought we’d go out rich and fat and old on a, a pyre of our ill-gotten gains.”

Link’s lips twitch. Rhett can’t see his eyes through the crystals on his glasses, doesn’t want to let go of his hands to move them out of the way.

“Being fat wouldn’ta suited you.”

Rhett’s eyes sting—gunpowder, gasoline, greasepaint. The laugh bubbles up unbidden, painful.

“I could have been fat. I could’ve been massive. Didn’t think you'd look good without bangs, did I? And you proved me wrong.”

Link’s fingers tighten and release. His laugh is barely an exhale.

“You think, think my hair looks good?”

“Yeah, man.”

“Think I’m c-cute?”

Rhett’s chest burns (worse than than it had after their first footrace through Los Santos, worse than it had when they'd sent the flour mill up in flames). 

“You’re real cute, Link.”

The clouds of their breath mingle and Rhett can almost imagine it happening in a happier place until Link speaks–soft, quiet.

“Take my, my glasses off.”

Rhett’s fingers can’t tell frames from skin, but somehow he does it. Link’s eyes are clear, bright, bluer than most anything.

“Your lips match your eyes, man,” Rhett mumbles. Link ignores him.

“You wanna like, g-get coffee or somethin’? When we get outta here?”

His voice is fading fast.

“Yeah, let’s get coffee.”

“I-I mean like a…”

If the situation were different, if he had time to to panic, if Link’s cheeks had more color in them, it would have gone differently–almost did go differently on a hundred different nights, a hundred different injuries.

But in the here and now Rhett’s the one to rub his thumb across Link’s cheek. He can’t feel it, doubts Link can, but the sight of it is certainly something, certainly enough for Rhett to blow out a breath that billows between them before putting words to the secret.

“Like a, a date, man, I get it. You gotta get out of here first, though. You hear me?”

Link turns his head and the brush of his lips over Rhett’s knuckles is warmer than it has any right to be.

“I hear you, man,” he breathes.

(It isn’t any skill of theirs that means they make it out of it. It’s Bereta and his Beretta that finally blasts his way through the barricade keeping them in. Rhett thinks he tells him that it’s Joe that’s gonna get them their joe, had to have, because after the shrapnel he hadn’t mentioned is dug out from his leg and his slurred threats have gotten him to Link’s bedside, Rhett’s got two decafs propped in his lap waiting to make good on his promise.)

**Author's Note:**

> find me at egocentrifuge.tumblr.com


End file.
